Baker seeks $5M for fighting fentanyl

By Colin A. YoungState House News Service

Monday

Oct 29, 2018 at 9:23 PMOct 29, 2018 at 9:23 PM

BOSTON — Gov. Charlie Baker announced new legislation Monday that seeks $5 million to launch a pilot program for a "regional, multi-agency approach to fentanyl interdiction and crime displacement," aiming to give local police departments the money he believes they need to work together to take drug dealers off the streets.

"Fentanyl is clearly, in many respects, the most dangerous element in street drugs here in the commonwealth of all," Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday morning. He called the powerful synthetic opioid a "major source of pain, suffering and death."

Baker said his proposal targets drug dealers who, after a law enforcement crackdown in one city or town, move to a nearby municipality to continue their illicit business without the same level of scrutiny from police. He said the funding he hopes will be made available would help agencies better coordinate their drug-fighting efforts.

"We want to give departments the resources to coordinate with each other across their districts, essentially flooding the zone against the drug dealers who are peddling addiction and death in their communities," the governor said. "We want to go after the dealers who too often evade authorities by moving to another nearby location in a different municipality."

Baker said the $5 million he is asking the Legislature to approve will be used to "supplement surveillance work and overtime costs for units" and that the proposal was "developed in concert with many Massachusetts police departments interested in a regional approach to the epidemic."

"Certainly heroin and other dangerous drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil are not confined to any specific jurisdictional boundaries, however they continually seem to have a disparate impact in the urban cities across the state," Chelsea Police Chief Brian Kyes, who serves as president of the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police Association, said at a press conference with Baker. "In that vein, it makes perfect sense for police departments to have the ability to collaborate by sharing not only intelligence but also resources, personnel, and equipment to tackle this significant problem."

In a letter to lawmakers, Baker said his proposed initiative would "require communication and information-sharing among police departments, and whenever possible, coordination of their activities to facilitate arrests of traffickers in a given community and to reduce the displacement of drug dealers into neighboring communities."

If the Legislature enacts his proposal — lawmakers have steered away from major policymaking since July — police departments would have an opportunity to bid for some of the $5 million in funding to go after fentanyl traffickers and dealers, Baker said Monday morning.

The governor said Monday morning that he hopes the Legislature will consider his bill during the final two-plus months of this session.

"Our hope is that the Legislature would take this up. This issue is front and center for all of us," Baker said. "It's my hope that we would be able to move something like this in an informal."

Legislative leaders seemed to dismiss that possibility by Monday afternoon, after having met with Baker for a semi-regular leadership meeting.

"We will take a look at it," Senate President Karen Spilka said. "It was just rolled out, we haven't had a chance to really review it and take a look at it, but we clearly will."

House Speaker Rober DeLeo said he takes any drug legislation seriously and will review the governor's proposal. Asked whether the governor's proposal could pass during informal sessions, DeLeo was doubtful.

"I'm not so sure about that," he said. "At this point, I'm not sure if it could. But I think in any case it gives us food for thought at the very least right now as we're coming down to the end of session and preparing for the next session."

The latest state data on opioid overdoses, released in August, logged a new high in the prevalence of fentanyl. In the first quarter of 2018, fentanyl was found in 89 percent of opioid-related overdose deaths where a toxicology screen occurred, up from about 40 percent in 2014.

"When we first started talking about and focusing on the opioid and the heroin epidemic in 2015, the term fentanyl was hardly ever mentioned," Baker said Monday. "Despite that, fentanyl and the drug traffickers who sell it continue to fuel the deadly heroin and opioid epidemic that's ravaging our communities."

Since 2014, the rate of heroin present in opioid-related overdose deaths has been falling, while the rates for fentanyl and cocaine have been trending upward, the last state report said. In the first quarter of 2018, cocaine (43 percent) and benzodiazepines (42 percent) were present in more opioid-related deaths than heroin or likely heroin (34 percent), according to the report.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling announced that federal authorities had broken up a fentanyl-dealing operation in the Greater Lawrence area and had seized more than 10 kilograms of the opioid, which Lelling said was enough to kill half the population in the state of Massachusetts.

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